For the past few days I've been using this amazing little firebird extension. Its called Adblock. It is easily one of the best ad blockers that I've seen. No need for clumsy proxy servers and such. And coupled with firebird's popup blocker, my internet experience is once again like it used to be about 3 years back (no ads!). It is specially great for browsing Indian news websites like TOI etc. Also works great with /., and Google Adsense.
The way this works is that each time you see a website ad, you hit a hotkey combination, select the offending image, and add a regular expression that defines its url to your list of filters. Though there is no official template, lots of examples can be found on the forum. I'll also keep an updated copy of my filters here (mainly to sync between the three computers that I use). Its amazing how many ads can be taken care of with a surprisingly small number of filters!
On a related note, I was forced to use Internet Explorer recently after a long time (thanks to websites not sticking to standards). The whole experience is so much worse. Popup ads, no tabs, no middle mouse clicks, animated ads... I never really liked or used IE, but with firebird/mozila improving so much in recent years, IE is now far behind (imho - ofcourse, a majority would think otherwise).
While you are at it, also check out preferential, an extension that adds lots of advanced preferences to mozilla/firebird. Really cool!
Posted by ankit at December 31, 2025 08:10 PM | TrackBack